


and the walrus spoke of time

by mouseymightymarvellous



Series: tales of gutsy shinobi [8]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pirate, Background characters - Freeform, F/M, Pirate Fest 2019 was just an excuse for me to write self-indulgent swashbuckling, broad worldbuilding strokes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-29
Updated: 2019-04-29
Packaged: 2020-02-09 16:41:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18642013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mouseymightymarvellous/pseuds/mouseymightymarvellous
Summary: When Kakashi stands with one hand on his ship's wheel, feet firmly planted with a sword at his hip and the wind in his hair, there's nothing else in the world that he needs. (The Jolly Roger flies above his head, and he's never been anything other than a liar.)a small collection of oneshots set in the same universe, written for kakasaku pirate fest 2019.





	1. coup de foudre

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day One: Treasure Hunt

Kakashi has never trusted magic (he can practically hear Rin rolling her eyes at him from atop the mast), but if Obito was enough of an idiot to exchange a pint of blood and two molars to a sea witch in exchange for a prophecy, well—

They’ve been out of good leads for longer than he likes to think about and even the stalest whispers have been colder than the Seal winds for months.

Kakashi isn’t the type to waste the possibilities that knock on his door. (Or, well, stroll up his gangplank blind drunk and bleeding at the gums.) He takes the map that Obito is waving around before the idiot can drop it off the side.

“So,” Rin asks later, perched on the table in the middle of the captain’s quarters as Obito snores inelegantly where he’s sprawled across the bed, stinking of rotgut and incense and salt.

The lantern light licks strange shadows across her face as she studies the map.

“You’re certain you’re willing to follow this? Even to the very end?”

Kakashi shrugs. “I hate to admit it, but I don’t have any other ideas. I haven’t heard from Jiraiya in a half-year, and Tenzō warned me last time we spoke that the Imperial Navy is getting closer. At the very least, we should head to one of southern islands for a while, until the heat lets up. Admiral Shimura won’t forget about us, but he doesn’t have the political clout to cross into the Rising Sun Armada’s territory without angering Admiral Senju, and he won’t be willing to chance angering the Emperor.”

Rin raises a single delicate eyebrow at him, demanding that he stop saying things she already knows and actually answer her question.

Kakashi sighs. “I liked you better when you were still in love with me.”

Rin laughs, her head falling back and the shadows tracing the line of her throat.

Kakashi purses his lips under his mask in an attempt to not laugh with her. “You should respect your captain, you know.”

Rin just laughs harder, and Kakashi tries not to think too much about the sound of crashing waves held there.

“Oh, Kakashi,” Rin finally manages, “one day you’re going to fall in love and drown in it.”

Kakashi ignores her and that and all that has sat between them unspoken since the day Rin dragged herself out of the ocean with seaweed in her hair and her eyes blacker than the most unknowable depths.

“For now, though, we’ll follow the map. Who knows what we’ll find at the end?”

 

 

Kakashi stands back, Rin and Obito at his shoulders as Gai cracks the wooden crate open.

It’s a fairly innocuous thing.

Kakashi is extremely interested in why the Gold Company were so distraught to lose it to their ambush.

(There’s also the matter of the map currently clutched in his hand, pulsating like it has a heart. But, well, Kakashi does his best these days not to hope.)

The top finally pops off with a loud clatter, and Kakashi adamantly does not hold his breath.

They wait for long seconds, but nothing happens.

It’s just a crate stuffed with hay.

“That was disappointing,” Obito opines, speaking for the whole crew.

And then an extremely disgruntled and hay-covered girl pops her head out of the crate.

The crew stares at her, taken aback.

She stares right back, more exhausted then surprised.

“This,” she says to no one in particular, “is what you get for trusting a man to be competent.”

 

 

Kakashi stares at the girl.

She stares right on back, apparently not too impressed by him, his sword, the scar bisecting his face, or the eyepatch.

Or, well, the fact that she is obviously a noblewoman stranded on a pirate vessel.

Oh, she isn’t dressed like one, in rough spun wool cloak with a brown scarf wrapped around her hair, but there’s no masking that diction.

Kakashi is a pirate captain and one of the best swordsmen in the Jade Isles. He is not going to be beaten by this slip of a noblewoman, flinty green eyes and stubborn chin non-withstanding.

“Should I call you Pearl, then?” he asks.

Her eyes go impossibly harder.

“Because, you know, I was promised some treasure at the end of this map, so you must be worth something.”

“I am going to slit your throat with your own sword and enjoy it,” she tells him, cheerfully.

Kakashi blinks.

 

 

“So, you ran away from a little girl, huh?”

Kakashi doesn’t dignify Obito with an answer and turns his face to the prow.

This, he thinks darkly, is why he doesn’t trust magic.


	2. masquerade

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day Two: Eyepatch

Kakashi is captain of the most renown and feared ship on the Shimmering Sea. And, while the ship and its reputation are inherited, he’s sweated and bled to be recognized as one of the most dangerous swordsmen in generations.

Also, his head is personally wanted by the Emperor.

In other words, Kakashi really isn’t certain how they’re three weeks out from the disaster that was following Obito’s sea witch bargained map, and somehow their prisoner is currently bickering with Rin and Asuma over the proper way to leverage the conflict within House Hyūga when attempting to trade at the Shifting Markets while the three of them plot over cargo manifestoes in the mess.

She’s supposed to be a prisoner!

Why is Rin nodding her head and jotting down notes?

Kakashi considers walking over to demand what is going on, considers the number of blows his pride has taken over the last three weeks, and goes to bother Obito instead.

Obito shouts at him for being overbearing and sends him to bed.

Kakashi adamantly does not pout as he sulks back to his personal quarters.

 

 

“So, Pearl,” Kakashi starts as he lays his hands on the table in front of her, leaning forward to crowd her field of view.

The prisoner pulls a knife out from under the table and stabs it into the wood between his fingers before Kakashi can even flinch.

Oh no, is that Gai yelling something about fire on the other side of the ship?

Kakashi valiantly charges off to supervise.

 

 

Gai and the prisoner stumble back onto the ship, some but not all of the crew trailing behind them, their arms swung over each other and belting out a drinking song at the top of their lungs.

She’s supposed to be a noblewoman. How does she even know the last four verses of _My Lovelorn Lad_?

It doesn’t matter, drawing the long straw and captaining the watch while the rest of the crew took time off to enjoy themselves gave him time go through the correspondence from Tenzō anyways.

 

 

“Here,” Kakashi barks out, and shoves the reed basket into her arms.

The prisoner blinks. “Thank you?”

Kakashi looks away, over at where the crew is lugging crates and barrels up the gangplank. “I thought you might want some tools, to keep your hands busy.”

She blinks again, and gently sorts through the thread and fabric and needles in the basket. Something curious and amused passes over her face as he watches, but it’s gone when she looks up, replaced by a small smile.

“Thank you,” she says more firmly, with only the slightest of hiccups rocking the words.

Kakashi nods, and stalks off to go help with a crate that just got stuck.

 

 

All Kakashi can taste is salt and iron as he whirls across the deck, lunging to stab the sailor about to put his sword through Asuma’s back.

When he finds out who at the Shifting Market sold them out, he’s going to string them up on the figurehead to die slowly as an example.

He hadn’t recognized the captain of the navy ship, but that doesn’t mean anything: the entire Imperial Navy is chomping at the bit to capture _The Leaf._

It’s chaos across the ship, but his crew is holding their own. Kakashi’s heart shouldn’t be beating a tattoo against his ribcage: they’re going to win.

And then Kakashi sees a flash of pink, and his heart stops.

 _No_.

There’s too many people and he can’t get his sword to move fast enough as he wades over, trying to reach her.

She’s too close to where they were boarded.

There are too many Imperial sailors.

They aren’t going to stop and see her long gloves and delicate embroidery and know her for what she is.

They’re going to think she’s a pirate, and they’re going to kill her for it.

Kakashi leaves a swath of injured and dying behind him, blade too bloodied to flash in the too bright sun, the blue sky and blue waters around them bleeding to red.

He stumbles over a body, tripping into an open circle, sword coming up only just fast enough to parry a blow.

“Oh,” says the prisoner, her hemline drinking up the puddles of blood she’s standing in. “It’s you.”

 

 

“Look,” Haruno Sakura says, later, her fingernails crusted with gore and her hair a mess, “I never said I was a noblewoman, you just assumed.”

Kakashi clenches his hand in a fist and does not smack the table in frustration.

“We stole you from an outfit of the Golden Company, tasked with transporting ‘An item of grave importance to the Yamanaka family’. The embroidery on your dress is worth enough to feed a large family for half a year. You read and write and you have a deep knowledge of the current state of affairs between noble families.”

Haruno shrugs. “Yeah, and you wear an eye patch and fly a Jolly Rogers. Doesn’t make you lot pirates when you’re actually freedom fighters.”

“What,” Kakashi demands.

Haruno rolls her eyes. It’s an extremely indelicate gesture and he’s seen her do it at least once a day over the last two months. “You’re not exactly subtle, you know.”

Kakashi clenches his hand again and valiantly does not gesture emphatically.

Haruno pats him gently the arm and his fingers spasm.

“Don’t worry, if I hadn’t been trained from the age of 7 to guard the Yamanaka heiress, I probably wouldn’t have noticed. It’s just that we have an excellent network, and you lot attack way too many Imperial outposts to just be marauders.”

Kakashi puts his head down on the table and tries not to find her hand running through his hair comforting.

 

 

“So,” Obito says. “Did you have any further to fall? ‘Cause if so, I’ve got money on the sword did it for you, and Genma won’t pay up without verbal confirmation.”

“Obito,” Kakashi despairs, “I say this with all my heart: please fall off the side of the ship and drown.”

Obito laughs, and Kakashi responsibly doesn’t push him over.

He does hide a couple of snakes in the bottom of his bedroll the following week, though. Kakashi can’t let people keep disrespecting him like this.


	3. revelation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day Three: Walk the Plank

Kakashi has known betrayal and guilt and despair. They’re familiar friends.

(Rin’s hands reaching desperately for him as she plummeted past him, the way the wind whipped the rain like knives doing nothing to obscure the sheer panic as she fell from the mast, down down down into the storm and down down down into the sea.)

(Obito standing with nothing but a heavy wooden practice staff in hand, his small shoulders not broad enough to fill the doorway, backlit by the torches coming down the hall. And Kushina’s hands clawing at Kakashi’s back as he and Rin tug her onward, away, her blood staining their clothes the only reason she’s weak enough for them to drag her.)

(Minato’s scream of pain as they shoved the sword through his chest, his eyes not straying from Kushina’s corpse.)

(Itachi’s face lit by flickering light as _The Leaf_ races further and further from shore, half the army at his back and unable to reach them as they speed away.)

(Every time he sees a proclamation signed by the Emperor, and he remembers whose name it should be there.)

They’ve never burned quite like the harsh scrape of a noose around his neck before.

Sakura’s eyes are flecks of jade, hard and unyielding and brilliant, as she sits in the stands watching.

His neck doesn’t burn as badly as his lips from when he kissed her traitorous mouth.

He should have known that Obito’s magical map, paid for in blood and bone, couldn’t be trusted.

He should have thrown it overboard.

He should have tossed the girl they found in a box off the stern of the ship, and left her to the sharks and the seals and the storm.

Kakashi doesn’t think about the ways those green eyes can light up like first dawn, bleeding the world to colour and stealing his breath.

Kakashi doesn’t think about what the soft skin of her stomach tastes like in the moonlight.

Kakashi doesn’t think about the how her laughter would curl like smoke in the night, sinking into his lungs and settling there.

It’s cold comfort that the rest of the crew escaped the ambush.

Kakashi hopes that they’re far and away.

(Rin clawed her way out of the sea with seaweed in her hair and tides in her eyes and gills carved into her neck. On new moons, she dives off the side of the ship and doesn’t return for days.)

(Obito walked onto _The Leaf_ eight years later with his throat raw from screaming and missing an eye and three fingers and entire months. He’s never said why sometimes the contacts he knows across the Isles know him by different names or exactly what price he paid for escape.)

(Kushina died and Minato died and Naruto is as good as dead.)

(Kakashi wonders what he’ll sacrifice for survival, and knows it isn’t much. He’s not valuable enough for what he would have to give up to save himself. He never has been.)

If he is going to die, he isn’t going to die looking down.

Kakashi holds Sakura’s stare and refuses to flinch.

The Headsman is yelling through the crowd’s rumbling, presumably listing off his crimes, but all Kakashi can hear is the beat of his heart and the far off echo of Sakura whispering his name as she buried her face in his throat and tried not to scream.

Kakashi holds Sakura’s stare and refuses to let her look away.

The crowd goes silent in anticipation.

The noose tightens.

And Sakura winks.

 

 

“For someone with one good eye, still, you’re awfully blind,” drawls Countess Yamanaka from where she’s lounging against the table in the middle of a dusty office in a warehouse not far from the docks.

“Maybe I’m just that good?” Sakura offers from where she’s standing at rest on the other side of the room.

Countess Yamanaka gives her a look filled with years of meaning, as indecipherable as the strata of a canyon wall. “Despite mine and my family’s best efforts, we both know that’s not true. There’s a reason you generally wield the sword.”

“Will someone, anyone, please finally tell me what the hell is going on?” Kakashi demands, avoiding Sakura’s gaze.

“Sure,” says a male voice, suddenly appearing in the now open doorway. “It’s about time you knew the truth.”

Sakura’s posture doesn’t change, but the Countess has tensed almost imperceptibly.

Two men walk into the room, one tall with dark hair and darker eyes and shadows wrapped around his shoulders.

The other is blond and golden and shining.

Without thinking, Kakashi mouths a familiar, long worn name.

“I’m sorry, I’m not Minato,” the man says. “But I am so happy to finally see you again, Kakashi.”

Standing in this dingy warehouse office is Namikaze Naruto, rightful Emperor of the Jade Isles.


	4. exhale

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day Four: Land Ahoy!

Kakashi blinks and bites down on his tongue, probably drawing blood from the sudden iron taste. “I told you not to move until Rin, Obito or I could come back for you,” is all he manages to say through the noose around his neck, the saltwater in his lungs.

Naruto, and it could be no one else, even if the last time Kakashi saw him he was six years old and all elbows and smiles wider than the horizon. Twenty years, and Kakashi would know Minato’s eyes and Kushina’s smile anywhere.

(He’s tried to forget. Drowned himself in rum and blood and the Shimmering Sea, but it’s never taken. He’ll remember the sight of Minato’s shadowed eyes as they looked beyond the world into the next with a dagger tumbling from slack hands and Kushina’s smile laughing even as her head sat wrong on her shoulders, her neck snapped, for the rest of his life.)

Naruto’s smile is still as wide and his eyes as blue and he looks sorry as he watches Kakashi, looks unapologetic. “There was a magical frog,” he explains, which isn’t an explanation at all.

Kakashi doesn’t know if Naruto means an actual magical frog or simply the kind of imaginative story that children tell themselves. The world is weird enough that Kakashi doesn’t know if he wants to know.

“Naruto,” snaps Countess Yamanaka from where she’s still leaning against the rickety table, uncaring of the dust.

Naruto nods. “I know, Ino.” And he rolls his eyes and stretches his hands over his head and rocks his weight side to side. “Shikamaru is particular about his scheduling.”

In the corner, Sakura mutters something uncomplimentary about “Shikamaru’s godsdamned plans” and “next time I’m shoving him in the box”.

Kakashi refuses to look at her, away from the gravity of Naruto’s presence, afraid of—

Well. It doesn’t matter.

It’s never mattered what Kakashi has wanted, not in the face of the mission, and now the mission is standing in front of him, alive and twenty-six years old and even more brilliant that the binary stars of Minato and Kushina circling each other.

“I’d like to hire _The Leaf_ for a job,” Naruto says, finally.

Kakashi can’t speak to tell him that _The Leaf_ has been Naruto’s flagship since the moment his parents were murdered and Kakashi will fight and die for his cause.

It’s been twenty years; he doesn’t know if Naruto even understands.

“You’ve been fighting the Eastern Armada for a decade now. How would you like to end it?”

As if there was ever a choice, when Naruto is alive and shining, the afterimage of a crown writ across his brow.

 

 

Sakura stands at his side at the ship’s wheel. Kakashi can’t bear to look at her.

He doesn’t know what he’ll do.

(The noose is tightening around his neck and all he can see are green, green eyes.)

So, instead, he watches the crew scramble, prepping _The Leaf_ to cast off.

“You could have told me,” he says, finally, after the silence standing between them is enough to weigh the entire ship down.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Sakura shrug.

“I didn’t know if I could trust you,” she says, brutal as a knife to the ribs.

“I thought I could trust you.” The truth—carved out of him unwillingly. “And then you sold me out and let them set me up to hang.”

Sakura doesn’t flinch away.

“I would see you hang one thousand times over if it meant Naruto succeeded. Would you want anything else?”

Kakashi turns and yells some orders to Gai, and lets the conversation sink under the waves, to swallow them up later.

 

 

Twenty years, Kakashi has spent fighting for a dead boy, fighting for the dead, fighting like the dead who haven’t yet realized they have died, fighting eternally and hopelessly and helplessly, fighting to fight and fighting to breathe and fighting to die.

Naruto says “Here’s the plan.” And twenty years are nothing in the face of the storm he unleashes.

 

 

“My name is Namikaze Naruto,” Naruto says, hand outstretched in blessing to the robed man sprawled across the floor of the Sun Room. “My father was Minato, Emperor of Lighting, and my mother was Kushina, the Laughing Fox, and I am the rightful Emperor of the Jade Isles.”

Minato died with a knife in his hand and Kushina died smiling surrounded by bodies and Naruto lives, arms outstretched, ready to welcome the world.

The day streams through the giant stained glass windows, lighting the whole scene in soft pinks and round violets and creeping greens and shimmering blues.

Naruto holds a hand outstretched to his enemy, his usurper, his would-be-murderer, and forgives him.

Sakura wields the Sword of Truth, and stabs him through the heart.

 

 

“I am never not going to be the sharp edge of a blade,” Sakura tells Kakashi, much later, when battles have been fought and won and they are rebuilding from the wreckage, from the wreckage of twenty years. “And neither are you.”

The moonlight is glaring and unflinching and Kakashi kisses her like he hopes to find salvation from the breath in her lungs.


	5. horizon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Day Five: Paradise Island

Sakura is quiet and strangely pensive when she finally stops by their apartments in the palace to rest before dinner.

Not that she isn’t reflective—but there is something queer and humorous and almost sad about the particular twist of her mouth. Kakashi catches her by the hand, and she lets him spin her up against his chest, her head falling back to look him in the face.

Kakashi leans forward, slowly, and presses a kiss to the divot in her forehead, which promptly relaxes.

Sakura sighs, then, and blinks her eyes open to finally meet his intent gaze.

“No trouble,” she reassures him. “Just—“

Kakashi lets her breathe as she assembles her thoughts, content to let her reveal her secrets in her own time. (She always does, eventually.)

“Hmm,” Sakura finally continues. “I overheard a puppet show when I was down in the city. I never thought that we would be a story, is all. It almost— Well, it almost hurt, I suppose, to hear our struggles reduced down into something for enjoyment.”

Kakashi leans forward again and presses another kiss, this time to her hairline, and stays there, breathing her in, their hearts pressed close.

“So much has already been lost of it all. How much more of our hurts will pass out of time between now and our deaths, and beyond?”

Kakashi shifts his hold on her so that his hands span her back.

He can feel the strength of her, under his touch. Can feel her ribs expanding and collapsing under the force of her lungs. Can feel the slow drum of her pulse beating.

Kakashi knows so much of hurt and grief and scars.

He holds this creature of violence in his arms and she relaxes into him by inches, settling like moonlight on the tranquil sea.

“What a relief,” Kakashi answers her, “to be left only with so much joy.”

 

 

Kakashi laughs as the wind whips passed him, stealing the breath from his mouth.

He can taste salt and sunlight and the horizon.

Under his steady feet, _The Leaf_ slices through the water.

Above his head flies the golden sun of the Imperial flag.

Sakura hooks her chin over his shoulder and hums. It echoes against Kakashi’s spine.

Here they are: to the very end and beyond.

Kakashi has never trusted magic, but here he is, regardless.

The future stretches forward in front of them, and Kakashi, for once, tumbles joyfully into the waves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "The time has come," the Walrus said,  
> “To talk of many things:  
> Of shoes— **and ships** —and sealing-wax—  
> Of cabbages— **and kings—**  
>  And why the sea is boiling hot—  
> And whether pigs have wings."
> 
> From "The Walrus and the Carpenter" by Lewis Carroll, _Alice in Wonderland_


End file.
